London Tide - Lyttleton Theatre (NT)

If it comes off, it'll be something .. god bless you, Polly >>

Have been listening to this on repeat, super excited for this one





Do we think there'll be water on stage?

I also have tickets for this. I am looking forward to seeing Jamael Westman who I remember seeing in the first month of Hamilton (my then teenage daughter begged me to get tickets for her and her friend!) I remember seeing him a little while later in the audience of a proms concert and getting the feeling that he was a well grounded young man who hadn't let the attention go to his head. Nice to see him doing well.

Why is everything so bloody long these days?

I have the opposite view: Why is everything so bloody short? I'm tired of 1 1/2 hour plays with no interval. 

I enjoyed the NT's 3 1/2 hour production of Ibsen's The Emperor and Galilean (2011) with Andrew Scott but was disappointed that they didn't present the eight-hour version.

I attended the first performance last night. The show went up a few minutes late. The first act ran one hour 40 minutes. They seemed to cut the interval a bit short because of the late start. The second act was around one hour 20 minutes.
I would call this a play with music. Every single song sounds exactly the same, a combination of a sea shanty/funeral dirge. As is quite typical now there is no set, but there is a cool glossy black floor to represent the reflection of water. Furniture is brought on and off, and there are light battens that fly in and out to look like undulating waves and to make the space claustrophobic during specific scenes. There is a band upstage and the gentleman playing the guitar is seated when he's not playing, so every time he would stand up, everybody in the audience would know that someone on stage was about to sing something.
I was sitting in the circle, there were lots of walkouts at the interval. I counted at least 20 empty seats as the second half was starting.
Ben Power had a monumental task adapting this for the stage and quite a bit of it is direct address to the audience. There were lots of comments at the interval about the fact that if they just cut the songs and did it as a play straight through it would be better. Everything seemed to run very smoothly last night. You wouldn't know it was the first performance.

I was about to be all critical about 'the failure to adapt' - particularly when the use of Direct Address should be the mechanism for jumping us through the narrative.  But...

I looked at Audible, to find that the full audiobook as read by Meera Syal is a few minutes short of 35 hours!

Then again, Les Miserables is 68 hours.

Repress/dress
really?

I walked out at intermission. It was probably the worst show I have ever seen, and I make and watch theatre for a living. Dull, slow, like a funeral. Like they were just playing a game of how many times they could say ‘London’ and how many different London neighbourhoods they could mention in 3 and a half hours. Terrible writing - flat characters, half a plot. And PJ Harvey just isn’t a theatre songwriter. Every song sounded exactly the same and also were completely out of the actors ranges. Uninspiring direction that relied on moving light rigs, which were meant to look like waves or the movement of water and which eventually became so nauseating the woman beside me said she might be sick. The actors just looked embarrassed and like they wanted it to be over. The guy playing the schoolmaster kept rubbing his face and eyes as if he’d just woken up. Completely bizarre. It felt like a GCSE show. I really hope they can pull it together by Press Night. And it could have been so good…

You might have guessed, but I LOVED this!

I do acknowledge that this is going to be marmite, with Dickens fans missing some of their favourite characters, and with some drama and musicals fans wondering why the action keeps stopping for a mournful PJ Harvey song about London which does not move the plot forward.

Some spoilers follow. . .

If you love Silas Wegg or Mr Venus or the parasitic social climbing Lammles, forget about it, they're gone. The wider world of the novel is gone.

Ben Power has focused on the two ladies, Ami Tredea's Lizzie Hexham and Bella Maclean's Bella Wilfer, and their relationships, and then he borrows a bit from Shakespeare comedies to tie up the plot more simply and directly than Dickens ties it up, albeit one character gets the more modern feminist not-defined-by-a-man "Bad Cinderella" type of trajectory lol.

Anyway, the bare bones of Dickens's ingenious plotting is still there to enjoy, although his simplistic themes are deepened by PJ Harvey's input.

This is not a musical where the music directs the action. This is a play with music which stops the plot to deepen the show with thematic resonances

So where Dickens would be saying that greed is bad and love is good, and snobbery is bad and egalitarianism is good, this production employs PJ Harvey to layer on something a bit deeper: about how landscape shapes the people on it and how people shape the landscape in return, how London is and always has been a seething mass of people's histories that imbue it with rivers of meaning and which imbue meaning in its river, and about the specificity of London as a living organism: how "London is not England, and England is not London."

If you've seen "the Detectorists" on the telly, then Dickens's vibrant plotting of London lives full of action, love, life and death is presented here as part of London's history below the ground, submerged in the tide of the river, while PJ Harvey's songs are kind of above the ground, above the water, scanning like metal detectors, finding connections, each song saying "What you got?"

Her songs are about the connections between the present and the past, about the interconnection of environment and people, about the sweep of local history.

I found the melding of bits of Dickens with bits of PJ Harvey quite unique and wonderful, more than the sum of its parts.

Ami Tredea's Lizzie's emotional responses to everything and everyone around her are brilliantly realised, and her connection with Jamael Westman's Eugene Wrayburn is moment to moment fascinating, and both these actors can sing.

That said, Wrayburn's character development here is nowhere near as well realised as it was in that 1998 BBC TV adaptation, where the 5 and a half hour running time allowed for a magnificently intricate and enigmatic depiction of the character by Paul McGann.

Interestingly, Peter Wight was in that BBC series as Bella Wilfer's Dad who hands over his daughter to the care of the wealthy Boffins. Here he plays Boffin, taking custody of Bella from her Dad, completing a kind of circle lol. Wight is great, but again, the part is much diminished in colours from the magnificent performance by Peter Vaughn in said BBC TV show (which I now would love to see again lol).

As Bella, Bella Maclean is another actor who can sing, though neither of her potential beaus, Tom Mothersdale and Scott Karim's Bradley Headstone could be classed as natural singers. Karim does make a dastardly well-acted villain, though, and Mothersdale's more nuanced John Rokesmith is utterly intense and compelling.

The untrained singing does not really matter as PJ Harvey's music is about ordinary people being part of the land and water, so earthy untrained singing is a good fit for it, and this is not a musical anyway, but a play with music. (And nobody is as earthy and untrained as Jake Wood's Gaffer Hexham, whose untrained singing was redeemed by his spot on acting).

The most surprisingly delightful performance of the evening was by Ellie-May Sheridan, as the girl who treats dolls as babies, Jenny Wren. In the Dickens, she comes across as tragic, but here she's a delightfully direct, forthright and funny friend for Lizzie, who lights up every scene she's in.

Anyway, count me among those who think that Dickens and PJ Harvey do mix well to the tune of 4 stars.

I also left at the interval on Friday night, now wondering how many actually stayed to the end! I am a big fan of both Dickens and PJ Harvey so was expecting to really enjoy this but it was incredibly plodding and dull with all of Dickens incredible language, wit and characterisation stripped out. The songs really didn't work well and only served to make the pace even more glacial. Disappointing evening and horrible for the actors who were doing their best with an incredibly poor script.

Whilst I agree this was another very disaPpointing evening at THE NATIONAL!, like 95% of the audience we stayed for the second act. Things improved (quite a bit from a really low standard) as the need to race through plot lessened.

The music puzzled me. At first I thought how did they find so many poor singers? Why were all the songs mid paced? Why was there no variety in style of singing or song? But the chorus's showed harmony and that the singer's could sing. Every song followed that format, with the only life being the "crowd" coming together. Was the director making some point that escaped me? In the end I was too bored to bother t o try figure it out.

I've returned my tickets. I've seen too many average productions recently to risk another one. Life's too short (and expensive).